The air was stirring around us; I was aware of its currents, its sworls; but what magic was suffusing this café that smelled of frites and tobacco? “Eat!” said the mother. The girl moved her head and waved her right hand above her plate without lifting her eyes from me. “Look at your plate, and eat!” I lowered my eyes to escape her too-insistent stare. I became awkward. My glass of red wine, overturned on the tablecloth, stained my abandoned pages, but this accident did nothing to break the charm: the sunlit dirty walls, the smirched tablecloths, the dumb smiles, the smell of fried fat.
The girl’s stare bore down on me again. Her right hand dropped the fork and moved back and forth in the air, her thumb glued to the tip of her middle finger. Confronted with this obscene gesture, I lowered my eyes and then saw, under the table where she was sitting, her fat legs, her cotton stockings, her snow boots. She was pissing with joy! One of her legs was drenched, while she continued to wave her wrist over the table. The mother grabbed her daughter’s hand and put the fork back in it. “Eat, Nathalie.”
Everything was covered in white light. The bread, the cheese: heavenly manna, its taste heightened by the brightness. Sadness, disgust were gone. Everyone was feeling what I felt; I could tell by watching the surprised faces of the guests. Some were lifting their hands to touch the air; some were laughing like children.
The needles of ice on the windowpanes—melted by sweetness?—parted to let the bright rays shine through, forming stained-glass windows of mother-of-pearl, opened like wings. The fake flowers on the bar counter became as white feathers, beaded with blood.
The idiot girl started to stir again, looking for my glance, waving her obscene hand. A cruel thought assailed me, and I made an effort not to shout aloud “Let her sing, the little fool! Let her sing once or twice in her life, the little bitch!” What she sang wasn’t exactly Orpheus’s song, as you might well imagine.
The little idiot was onto me. Crazed with delight, she dropped her piece of cake, hid her face in her mother’s bosom, and then grabbed at the waitress’s apron in passing, demanding her pencil and order pad in a whiny voice: “Lalie wants to draw!… Gimmee!” “Shut up,” said her mother. “I’m going to take her outside; she’s too worked up.” The waitress said, “Wait!” and looked behind the counter for another pad, another pencil. “Here, Nathalie, you can write and draw all you want.” The mother agreed, all smiles.
The light was a pearly white, coating every object in its caress. I considered this carefully, holding my breath so as not to break this gathering force by a single word—just as a single first step might crush the eggs of insect larvae barely hatched between the soil and the dew.
Now the light was chasing away all the shadows with frightening speed. The frost tightened its grip on the windows and, for a fraction of a second, the rays, diffracted by the crystals, traced an orange star upon the tablecloth where Nathalie was seated.
The girl was waving pages scribbled with circles, crosses, and hatchings every which way. “All done! All done!”
Gone was the charm and play of light. The bistro returned to being a mere bistro: cheap drinks, coffee, grease, and smoke. The faces were extinguished. “Leave it there. Come, come on!…” The mother got up and took her daughter by the hand.
Nathalie stuffed the papers into one of her pockets; her mother dragged her to the door. But as she was about to leave, the little idiot wheeled around and marched up proudly to me and placed the papers on my table.
I looked at the torn pages she had offered to me. Circles, crosses, hatchings (the uncanny parody of some unknown form of handwriting?), but also featuring real letters like S,A,E,R,N,O,G… Then, on another sheet, these three lines, carefully scripted:
4
Aseroë
I HAVE NOT BEEN SPARED from the ravages of forgetting. I wouldn’t be able to point to the exact street or to the house in front of which all this took place.
First, there was the Concert of Angels on the Isenheim Altarpiece, their fiery garments the same hue as those November vineyards back then in Colmar, and the Virgin with her incandescent crown, of which I had had a premonition the previous day, gazing at the starry sparkles of the local Moselle wine at the bottom of my glass…. But, most of all, there was the presence of Gunther and Claudine, whose friendship shielded me from difficult days.
I’m often haunted by those who’ve died young. Today I’m again haunted as I think of Claudine, my act of writing transforming my uneasiness into a species of terror, once I come to realize that all those who have died before their time, all those who never even had the chance to reach their prime, have now suddenly become my elders. Their faces have thereby achieved the status of icons, their smiles hanging frozen in the air, not as they might appear in past snapshots, but now frozen in the very air before me, at moments when I was sure they had completely vanished from my mind.
I find the streets and houses of this town quite uncanny, bearing as they do the imprint of someone now gone. Were I to return here, all these fine façades would be wrecked for me, as would the cathedral. The rain would be unremitting; everything would turn ugly before my eyes.
I hear Claudine laughing and making her little sarcastic comments, which so manage to impress and seduce both of us. I’m not talking about her beauty here, but about her voice, about her quirks of thought. We are carried away by her gaiety, but as soon as she has managed to draw the two of us into her mirth by a well-placed quip or caustic observation, she waits for just the right moment to deflate our laughter, brutally reminding us what fools we have been to fall for her dumb little jokes. Then, having reduced us to utter embarrassment by some dry or cutting remark, she then starts up again, captivating our bemused attention by commenting on this or that passing face or scene that she has just noticed as we three make our way down the street. In short, she loves leading us along by our noses. Which is, of course, why, without letting her know, we so adore her.
I had more or less forgotten all about her when, three years later, I received a long letter from her containing poems that struck me as rather arty. After signing off with “xxx kisses,” she added the following sentence, which I also thought was just a young girl’s daydreaming: “When it comes time to get out of here, we’ll take everything along with us, the entire world, meaning even Gunther, and even you.”
I wrote her back a letter that received no reply; a month later, Gunther wrote to tell me that Claudine was dead.